Radio access technologies have evolved through various generations to allow more functionality and higher peak data throughput rates, among other attributes. As new RATs are deployed, the use of legacy RATs that do not have the same functionality as the new RATS will likely begin to decline. The decline in traffic may create white space in frequency bands allocated to the legacy RAT, where the white space could potentially be used by the new RATs in cases where the new RATs may not have enough available bandwidth when initially deployed.
Currently, when a base station is overloaded and can no longer support the demand for initial bandwidth, the serving base station may force some UEs to handover to other neighboring base stations. The neighboring base stations may be selected based on the capability of a UE to receive the signal from the neighboring cell with an acceptable quality. Neighbor base stations may operate the same RAT or may be of different RATs.
Within current Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specifications, technologies such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) have a backhaul interface that may be defined between neighboring nodes. However in this case, the neighboring nodes belong to the same RAT. There is no backhaul interface currently defined in 3GPP for neighboring nodes of different RATs.